You look back at all the hallmarks of gaming history and it seems like director Tetsuya Nomura hasn't played any of them. Dark Souls, The Witcher 3, Mass Effect, Skyrim, they've all had nearly no influence on the long-awaited final product here. Kingdom Hearts III's combat is floaty, button-mashing nonsense. The worlds are single-player, mostly linear, and lacking a galaxy of sidequests. Loot is not the goal, you barely craft, and there are definitely no microtransactions. Instead you jam on the X-button, beat up Heartless, watch a few cutscenes, and then break up the action with a minigame. You don't see games like this anymore, and I love that defiance of all trends that Kingdom Hearts III represents.
It was fitting that a game I cannot believe actually exists at all is one that is utterly inexplicable in today's AAA landscape. I've been waiting for Kingdom Hearts III for so long that the wait itself has become a fundamental part of my being. How many times have I complained in E3 posts about the lack of Kingdom Hearts III? Now that it is here, I feel like a whole phase of my life has passed. And considering the epic mountain of hype I build around Kingdom Hearts III, it seems inevitable that the game would disappoint. I waited eleven years for Versus XIII and got Final Fantasy XV instead. It's 2019, the Starbucks guy wants to be President Centrist, Tom Brady won the Super Bowl for the ten thousandth time, and Bohemian Rhapsody is about to win Best Picture. We aren't allowed happy endings.
Or are we?
If you want a truly objective review of Kingdom Hearts III, you'll never get it because that's a fantasy that doesn't exist. But certainly the least objective review will come from your Blogmaster extraordinaire, the author, here. I cried a bit when I opened up the Amazon package and saw Nomura's artwork inside. I cried a lot more when we hit the title menu and "Dearly Beloved" starting playing. Kingdom Hearts III turned on the waterworks for me seven times. After what feels several lifetimes of playing these games, the characters aren't just important, they're basically my children to me.
This is the fifth Kingdom Hearts game we've reviewed here on Planet Blue, and please remember the disclaimers when I tell you this is the best one I've written about yet. However, if you don't love Sora and Roxas and Xion and Riku and Kairi, why are you even here? This is a game made for the lunatic fans who put up with the secret endings and breadcrumb mysteries since the Bush Administration. An "objective" critic is not the audience Nomura was aiming for. Kingdom Hearts III is an outstanding success that celebrates everything that has made this confounding and bizarre series such a journey worth taking. If you haven't taken that journey yet, you're starting at the wrong place.
Tone-wise and plot wise, Kingdom Hearts III feels like the end to a trilogy. Yes, despite the "III" in the title this game is actually the tenth game in this series. But thematically it works. Kingdom Hearts I set up our characters and their arcs, Kingdom Hearts II dropped us into increasingly weird twists and dark ends for characters, and Kingdom Hearts III takes everybody home. Our hero, Sora, is more confident in himself and more in control of his emotions. He's not the confused or petulant kid of older entries. He's still a dumbass shonen anime hero, but now he's matured into an easygoing, wiser dumbass. Kingdom Hearts III is a bloated knot of plotlines and story arcs from half a dozen different games. It somehow settles nearly all of them and in a satisfying manner.
For all the build-up of dramatic tension and mysteries, the truth is, Kingdom Hearts III is not as complicated as you'd assume. This isn't Metal Gear Solid 4 where the characters have to spend six hours explaining how everything connects together in one cutscene after another. The pieces were already set up in the other games. All that's left now is a that big fight of Good vs. Evil, without many huge twists. (There's still enough strangeness left over to set up a Kingdom Hearts IV, don't worry.) With all the balls spinning in the air you'd think it would be impossible to set everything straight, yet Kingdom Hearts III pulls it out with a lightness and ease which some might confuse for an anti-climax.
The result is a game that I would call more than else "pleasant". This isn't a brutal final war breaking our characters down. It's another adventure for characters you should know and already love. Sora is facing his greatest test and mightiest foe, but he's already assured and strong enough to face it.
Is Kingdom Hearts III actually as grand of a finale as fans were anticipating? In a few ways, it isn't. With a straight-forward structure and only seven Disney Worlds, Kingdom Hearts III is only about twenty-five hours long.
It feels breezier than previous games largely because it is a lot easier. I played this game on Proud Mode and only hit my first GAME OVER by nearly the end game. You will not be stuck for a week fighting Ansem-Riku in Hollow Bastion here. When people describe gameplay as "floaty" I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts and its ridiculous zero-gravity combos. Kingdom Hearts III triples down on how overpowered Sora is, giving you free Limit Breaks and free super forms almost every second. And yet as mindless as it might be I can't argue with how fucking awesome the gameplay looks.
Also not every characters gets the full attention they need. This is a big ridiculous anime saga with a dozen heroes and sadly not everybody gets an arc worthy of them. Kairi in particular gets shafted by terrible writing choices. Hopefully one day she gets her own game to fix how badly Nomura has treated her here. This is inexcusable.
Yet those are really my only complaints. Kingdom Hearts III knows exactly what kind of game it wanted to be. It is retro in ways that are outright strange at times. I don't really understand the choice to keep Save Points, for example. Considering what a state Final Fantasy is in - that franchise hasn't known what it wants to be since the PlayStation 2 - I am extremely happy to see Kingdom Hearts III stick to its guns and just be itself, but bigger, better-made, and with crazier combos than ever. Maybe you had something darker in mind, but that wasn't what this story needed.
The story structure pushes all the truly plot-relevant content to the back five hours of the game. You do not even fight a dude in a black Organization coat until you're on the final level. For the meantime, Sora, Donald and Goofy, (it is a rule that you must say all three of their names every time) travel through the Disney worlds and just do Disney stuff. The story barely explains why you're doing what you're doing other than as vague training for the big finale battle. Basically it's glossy high-concept procrastination. But is that a bad thing?
The Disney worlds have never been better. They start great and keep going strong all the way to the end. Normally a Kingdom Hearts game opens with a slow intro section involving you doing dull tasks like finding fruit or doing odd jobs until the game can truly begin. Kingdom Hearts III's tutorial world is the movie Hercules. You bash Heartless up the side of Mt. Olympus and then beat up all the Titans at once. The wild rococo meta plot can wait just a little longer when the worlds have exciting storylines and climaxes all of their own. Xehanort can chillax for a minute, I gotta see how Elsa and Anna work things out first.
The Disney worlds have long been criticized as filler and unimportant to the larger story. That may be true in Kingdom Hearts III too. But "filler" is an overly rough term to apply to the content here. The Disney and Pixar levels are effectively seven whole three-hour video games in of themselves. They come complete with well-crafted stories, interesting twists, and always end on incredible final bosses.
Some weorld are more traditional linear levels like Monster's Inc. Others allow modern open world gameplay to leaked into our Kingdom Hearts a bit. Big Hero 6 has a sizable Arkham-style San Fransokyo in which to fight Heartless. Pirates of the Caribbean is Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag minus the AssCreed*. Thanks to the power of PS4 graphics - the one gaming innovation that Kingdom Hearts III really commits to - the worlds look damn good. You aren't playing cheap imitations of Disney movies anymore, you're playing the movies. If you're disappointed like me that Tangled never got a proper video game adaptation, Tetsuya Nomura and his team are here to fill that void.
When Kingdom Hearts III does finally jump to that final Xehanort climax, you'd think the results would be a terribly-rushed last-minute disaster. Instead Kingdom Hearts III settles storylines one after another with surprisingly grace and a great deal of heart. The climax is an avalanche of feels as one crime of a past game is undone after another. All the scattered pieces fit back together elegantly.
Aside from one very unpleasant and bad plot decision, the climax is a long run of everybody coming together in the right way to do the right thing. Even the Organization XIII villains are seemingly playing this more for sport now more than actual malice. The final battles feature impressivel showmanship and showstopping setpieces that were worthy of the fifteen year wait. (And would you believe the most impressive setpiece of all involves a reference to the fucking mobile phone games?) The last boss is intense and legitimately hard even with Kingdom Hearts III's easy gameplay. You will get the explosive and preposterous JRPG experience. But I don't think you'll ever doubt that Sora is gonna win this one.
Return of the Jedi is a movie that is often maligned for being too cutesy and too kiddy after the miserable ending to Empire Strikes Back. I think people who say that are fools. A good end to a trilogy should be lighter than the dark middle sections. It is a rise to glory after the depths of failure. Kingdom Hearts III is that. Its very existence is almost a victory in of itself. That it plays and feels like a proper Kingdom Hearts and Square Enix didn't mess with the formula to turn it into something else, is an even more improbable victory. But the real triumph here is that Kingdom Hearts III never lets you forget that these characters are important to you. Their happiness and their joy is more important than all the Mystery Boxes and stupid plot twists in the world. If you aren't happy for them, I don't think you really understood what this long weird series was trying to say.
Kingdom Hearts III is the happy ending Sora deserved, it's the happy ending I deserve, it's the happy ending everybody deserves.
...
So Kingdom Hearts IV when?
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